Craddick: Oil industry regulators to add more inspectors

The Panhandle Producers and Royalty Owners Association annual convention over the last two days was a mix of seminars, hospitality opportunities, a trade show, a mobile oil field learning center for children and speeches, including one by Wednesday’s featured luncheon speaker Christi Craddick, a Texas Railroad commissioner.

Despite its name, the commission oversees the state’s oil and natural gas industry, and with business booming, it has needed more resources.

“We’re spending $16.4 million on information technology updates,” Craddick said. “It’s part for hardware, but a goal is to have a new website for things like permitting online.”

The agency also is spending more on personnel.

Some of the money is for raises to make it more competitive with other state agencies, but it’s also for subsidies for personnel in places with high costs of living and some for adding positions.

“We have about 700 people, give or take, and we got more money for pipeline inspection — 32 people,” Craddick said. “We have 160,000 miles of pipeline to inspect.”

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a process in which drillers inject water and other materials into wells to crack the oil- or gas-bearing formation to allow trapped oil or gas to flow into horizontal wells to be pumped out.

The Railroad Commission estimates 80 percent of new wells are fracked.

Opponents of fracking argue chemicals used in the process could contaminate groundwater.

“Some of the misinformation on fracking is the volume of chemicals going down the hole. The rest is sand and water,” Craddick said. “Also, we’re in the process of rule-making for disposal (of fracking fluids), and in May we updated recycling rules with the goal of more recycling rather than putting the water in injection wells.”

In the Texas Panhandle, fracking takes place a mile or more below aquifers holding drinking water.

While there is no state database of what is used in wells, the Railroad Commission passed a regulation in 2012 that all the contents of the fluid used in fracking on any Texas well that got a drilling permit on or after Feb. 1, 2012, must be disclosed in a national database on www.fracfocus.org.

There is also research on methods that don’t use water at all.

“I think the drought has been a good thing for the industry. It’s made them use water more efficiently,” Craddick said.

Also Wednesday, a team of oil and gas groups called the Statewide Joint Association Education Initiative, gave State Rep. Four Price, R-Amarillo, their Texas Legislative Champion award.

“The oil and gas industry is a driving economic force in our state, contributing immensely to the productivity and prosperity we appreciate in Texas,” Price said in a written statement.